Israel-Hamas: The Use of Force

As part of the Analysis of the Israel-Hamas conflict during a webinar hosted by thinc. the Hague Initiative for International Cooperation, while describing the horrific attacks by Hamas on Israeli villages in the South of Israel 2 weeks ago, on a Saturday morning, October 2023 - on the use of force and codes of conduct.

It is the basic ethos of Israeli fighting that Israel follows a code of what's called purity of arms. The IDF, the Israel Defense Forces’ servicemen will use its force of arms only for the purpose of subduing the enemy to the necessary extent and will limit his use of force so as to prevent unnecessary harm to human life and limb, dignity and property.?

When you have an operation like this one where the military need is to utterly destroy a terrorist organization that has the capacity to carry out barbarism of the level of the massacre that we saw on October 7th, an enormous amount of force has to be used. The military necessity is high, and it necessarily means that the tolerance for collateral damage is high.?

Hamas has exploited humanitarian assistance, which is in itself a crime. For example, by taking over fuel, food, medicines that have been supplied for humanitarian needs and stealing them for itself (Hamas), it's committing a crime. And I don't even have to talk about the obvious crimes, the rapes, the torture, the mutilations of the deceased and what's called in the Rome Statute ethnic persecution, that is the engaging and awful behaviour towards Jewish victims as Jews. Now there's also outside of the laws of war, Hamas is obviously violating the Genocide Convention. That is with the purpose of killing the Jewish people in whole or in part.?

All states, not just Israel, all states are charged with preventing even indirect support to terrorist organizations like Hamas. If there's no procedure for distributing humanitarian relief that prevents Hamas from seizing it, then Israel is not permitted to allow it. Now what, then, is the right answer? How do you provide, how do you save innocent civilians in a case like this when they're being used as human Shields by Hamas and Israel has the right and the necessity to use deadly means to destroy the terrorist organization that will harm its innocents. And the answer is clear, even if it's uncomfortable to our ears. And it is: we must rapidly evacuate as much as possible the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. We have to. If we can't force the terrorists to leave the civilians. We have to help the civilians leave the terrorists.

And it's just as unconscionable that even the United States, which has behaved better in this than the European Union and other states, the United States has put pressure on Israel to admit humanitarian supplies and not place pressure on Egypt to admit Gazan evacuees.

Andrew Tucker Avi Bell Maurice Hirsch

Sharing with you parts of our webinar from Oct 17th with Maurice Hirsch and Prof. Avi Bell. For the full webinar, click here: https://www.thinc-israel.org/webinars/webinar-iron-sword-october-17th-2023/